We use skin conductance responses and self-reports of hedonic valence to study the emotional basis of cooperation and punishment in a social dilemma. Emotional reaction to free-riding incites individuals to apply sanctions when they are available. The application of sanctions activates a...

We study the impact of communication on behavior in a two-stage coordination game with asymmetric payoffs. We test experimentally whether individuals can avoid a head-to-head confrontation by means of coordinated strategies. In particular we analyze whether and how quickly a conflict-avoidance...

The threat of overthrow stabilizes a constitution because it disciplines the elites. This is the main rationale behind rights to resistance. In this paper, we test this conjecture experimentally. We model a society in which players can produce wealth by solving a coordination problem....

We study the impact of communication on behavior in a two-stage coordination game with asymmetric payoffs. We test experimentally whether individuals can avoid a head-to-head confrontation by means of coordinated strategies. In particular we analyze whether and how quickly a conflict-avoidance...

We use skin conductance responses and self-reports of hedonic valence to study the emotional basis of cooperation and punishment in a social dilemma. Emotional reaction to free-riding incites individuals to apply sanctions when they are available. The application of sanctions activates a...

We explore the individual and joint explanatory power of concepts from economics, psychology, and criminology for criminal behavior. More precisely, we consider risk and time preferences, personality traits from psychology (Big Five and locus of control), and a self-control scale from...

In economic models, risk and social preferences are major determinants of criminal behavior. In criminology, low self-control is considered a fundamental cause of crime. Relating the arguments from both disciplines, this paper studies the relationship between self-control and both risk and...

We examine the impact of ethics and integrity training on police officers in Ghana through a randomized field experiment. The program, informed by theoretical work on the role of identity and motivation in organizations, aimed to re-activate intrinsic motivations to serve the public, and to...

The success of a country's anti-corruption policies can crucially depend on the citizens' beliefs about the existing legal environment. We test this key idea of Basu (2020) using a novel design which systematically manipulates beliefs of participants in an experiment. Our results suggest that...

We investigate how third-party punishers and potential violators decide under evidentiary uncertainty in a take game. In line with the legal requirement and in contrast to economic models, neither the sanction nor the harm level affects the punishment probability, but the quality of evidence...